About RF Cafe

RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling 2 MB. Its
primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed formulas and reference
material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit design engineer. The Internet was
still largely an unknown entity at the time and not much was available in the form of WYSIWYG
...

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Day in Engineering History Archive - December 3

December 3

1838:
Cleveland Abbe, known as "the father of the U.S. Weather Bureau,"
was born. 1888: German optician
Carl Zeiss, of precision optics fame, died. 1924: American computer
scientist
John Backus, inventor of the
FORTRAN
language (FORmula TRANslation), was born. 1942: American physicist
Peter Schultz, who is credited for inventing the first commercially
viable optical fiber, was born. 1956: The
USS Gyatt was recommissioned as the first guided missile destroyer.
1967:
Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant
on Louis Washkansky, who lived 18 days with the new heart. 1973:
Pioneer 10 passed Jupiter in the first fly-by of an outer planet.
1983: Over 40 tons of highly poisonous methyl isocyanate gas leaked
out of the Union Carbide pesticide factory in
Bhopal, India, killing thousands of souls. 1992: British engineer
Neil Papworth
sent the world's first text message (SMS). 1999: NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) lost communications with the
Mars Polar Lander moments before impact.

Note: These historical tidbits have been collected from various sources, mostly on the Internet. As detailed in
this article,
there is a lot of wrong information that is repeated hundreds of times because most websites do not validate with authoritative
sources. On RF Cafe, events with hyperlinks have been verified.

Please submit significant historical events and
dates for inclusion in these lists. I will be glad to include your name and birthday. Please do not submit your death
date ;-) A couple years ago, I began commemorating the birthdays of notable people and events with
special RF Cafe logos. Where available, I like to use images
from postage stamps from the country where the person or event occurred.